Flare Star
by Coronis
Summary: Kuja's future is beginning to catch up with him
1. Default Chapter

Everyone's going so damn fluffy for Valentine's....so why can't I milk it too? Thinking of you, you know who you are.  
  
Flare Star  
  
I don't know why I feel this way. It's not like I gave myself to her, if one person can ever truly own another. All I promised her was my body, my mind and this one day; she gave me the next. We kept up the pretence that neither party was addicted to this affair so long because we both saw fit to return the original favour, and donate another day to whatever bound us together. I don't know why I'm watching her sleep either, freezing my goddamn feet off on this balcony. He'll be back from the bathroom soon, so unless I want to be strung up by my hair and gutted in the street I'd better get going. My hair......I admit that I was somewhat disappointed when it stopped growing bright blond and turned as asphalt gray as the rain pelting the back of my neck. Should've seen that coming. My father drank almost as much as I do and his hair didn't put up with it long. Garland? My in locum parentis ringmaster then, for he trained me well, to fight but not to love. His only love was death. I can see myself reflected in the window, scattered shards of a drip-dried mural who crouches outside the Queen's chambers in the hope of at least loving her from a distance. Not that I couldn't gain entry should the desire awaken within me. I don't think he could hurt me with that rail sleeper he calls a sword, but I'm not too desperate to find out either. Oh, God, where did it all go so fucking wrong? Who is this pitifully tenacious mockery, master of his own empty castle who sneers down at me through the glass and dares to love my Dagger night after night? My reflection again.  
  
It isn't supposed to end like this. I can't die without hearing her call my name one more time, written in scarlet splashes decorating the walls of this palace, residues of Memoria blowing my cowl into curious nightmare shapes, refusing to let me rest. I haven't lain my aching head down in years, because I know that no matter how I wish for it I won't smell the sweet fragrance of her hair or see the gentle slope of her cheek when I open my eyes.  
  
Brothers in name alone, he says now, and that Dagger loves him. So suddenly, my Queen, you thrust me callously into disregard and watch me fade. Alas, I still love you. Didn't I hold you tight enough? Didn't you believe me when I called you my angel, myself the Angel of Death and heir to Garland's Hades. You would look positively enchanting upon the throne of Hell, of Terra, a dark-haired Persephone whose horn will grow back someday, I'm sure of it. I loved you then and I love you still. I'm sure that I'm screaming your name now.......but the wind tears my cries from the air and punishes me for these bitter tears. I can't hear the rain any longer, these racking sobs merciless and my resilient absinthian heart thumping far too hard for me to concern myself within the real world. If only you could see this, Dagger, would you still call me "monster"? A killer yes, but none so prolific as is written in the genes of your lover. It's his birthright, he can't fight it. Although I can't wait to watch him try.  
  
* * * *  
  
There it is, a venture into the unknown, FFIX. If anyone likes it it will continue. 


	2. Chapter II

Apologies for the long absence, but I'm back now. So is Flare Star, and possibly some more Matinee any time soon, the minute the characters put the words in my head you'll get them. Right now I'm just gonna sit down at my PC and see what happens. So sorry ahead of time for the grammar and shit like that, and I haven't actually completed FFIX so I'm guessing my ass off. I mean, improvising. Ahem. Expect a lot of cheesiness because it's very late and I have rubella so I'm not getting any.....anything!  
  
Flare Star - Chapter II  
  
Our future is written in tears and blood. Twinkling city lights sigh of fate and fury; the burden of the past will never be lifted. I observe, and slowly it kills me. Tonight Lady Freya's breath comes in shallow gasps beside her lord, Burmecia's finest knights embrace, an offering themselves upon the cool altar of a forgotten church. I do not look long, only a glance through a stone slit archery window, Fratley's words embalming the dusk air,  
  
"I love you, my lady, and I always have", the satiated gentleman whispered over unbroken ribbons of soft splintered light, reluctant to raise his voice and wake himself from his euphoric dream. I knew that words could cause pain, but never like this. I am flayed by the harsh persecutions of this land sans my angel, and now the world taunts me with these wretched lovers, indulging in something I cannot feel. I must see my Queen.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"What do you want with me?! Why do you keep coming here?", she clutches her nightgown about slim shoulders, stray wisps of black hair bustling with new growth rain down on the white silk. You know what I want, darling. What we had.  
  
"I just wanted to see you". It sounded just as stupid as I knew it would. As stupid as it had sounded last time, and the time before that.  
  
"You no longer possess that privilege. Leave at once before I have you escorted out", she has regained her regal composure, although as I recall she can still call me a scumbag with the best of them. Why then did she join me on the balcony for another stolen second away from him.......surely she cannot-  
  
"Leave my castle immediately!". Tears well up and barrel along her crisp, wind-chilled cheekbones, I know all I need to. The king will soon return from his patrol, as will the guards.  
  
"Very well. Until next time, my love". I dared to kiss her tears away, so softly I barely thought she felt my touch until her hands began to reciprocate, combing my filthy hair with a lover's dexterity, "My lady". With that I had torn myself from the smell of jasmine and roses, the memories of a year spent with a virgin princess long since obliterated by a jealous monarch. I knew I would hear that mournful despairing cry all the way back to Treno.  
  
A sharp click heralded the return of the king to his private chambers. He strutted about the boudoir, afloat on a crowd of self- adoration following a successful morning of maintaining the law.  
  
"Why's the window open, Dagger?", he arches an eyebrow, already assured of the reply.  
  
"Oh, no reason. Just Kuja again".  
  
* * * * *  
  
A little short, a little terrible, but first drafts are always shaky. In my case, earthquake tremors abound. Still, I will make this a long fic, based on how I think FFIX ended.  
  
Kuja will never die.  
  
Coronis 


	3. Chapter III

Chapter III  
  
Growth is as slow as change, the shifting sands of this world bulbous and swollen within an hourglass of tears, and all its piteous emotion is merely something that happens to other people. Including the Queen. Sitting by the water, watching wings of glowing wind rape the trees and steal their secrets. It may seem that my languid well of constant inanition is all I have, safe in unrelenting darkness. It is not all I have, it is all I chose to keep. Assuming solitude is a safe place when the greatest threat upon your life is yourself. I can still taste her in my mouth, blood-warm and saccharine, blessing my body with shots of some rainbow endorphin. Stirred only twice by love's clement kiss, here I stargaze upon these forgotten things, the reason Dagger is groomed to despise me and why the Angel of Death himself is still so lost.  
  
So step into my mind if you dare, a tortured niche carved into Garland's exalted nothingness, where few risk their earthbound souls and from which even fewer emerge alive. Which portal? Which rift in concentric epochs, each a sapphire streak of cognitive lightning? Of course, the past. My secret life, my secret lover, whose hands I bound with cut lengths of my own hair and dared to call my own. He always walked a certain way, his tousled leucous head and smoke-blue eyes downward, seemingly shy yet always knowing, like he'd just gotten one-up on the world. Truly he was perfect, and that in itself was my undoing, for the very nature of sumblimity is that it cannot be imprisoned in one man's heart, no matter how hard he wishes for it. As Heaven to the beasts of Hell, clawing at its pristine gates in vain with our bloodied ashen claws. Hell is not a volatile cauldron of molten brimstone and unspeakable sin, tended by staggeringly beautiful abominations. It is sleeping with one, and never once hearing him call your name. I love Dagger more than I care to understand, but I loved this swordsman first. He left without so much as a farewell for a lover, a woman, who would grant him the onus of dominance, an affliction he was denied so long. What was it he used to call me? It was not my given name.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Wake up! Can you hear me in there? The barrier's down, we have to MOVE, goddamn it!", this voice offered nothing in return or placating sacrifice as it savagely penetrated my chasm of dreams, instead stealing me away from my thoughts. Memories came next, awakened by the sound, of how first the sky bled, then the clouds turned black as blinding ichor burned my eyes shut and flayed my screams to dust.  
  
"What colour is the sky?", I implored the voice, twitching a feathered stump at my shoulder as it wept the same ether. I could not feel my legs.  
  
"What the fuck? Oh, the boss is really gonna like this bullshit. You can tell him", came the first voice, Dragon, as I had christened him, for presently he had no face to shine through the black pool I lay in, although I knew his hair must be unkempt and as red as the fire in his lungs.  
  
"You tell him! It was your idea anyway. What do we do with him now?", the voice of Serpent hammered my senses again, testing the paper-thin border between madness and melancholy. Leave me, both of you......I just want to see the sky......my eyes are sewn shut.......  
  
* * * * *  
  
I heard a man call out in pain and rose to my feet, my head whipping sround in search of him. Until I realised that my own cries were what disturbed me, the progressive nightmare that grows more vivid and deep- seated each evening, and for which I have no explanation. Rushing back now, all the hellish slumbers and flashes of steel on steel, poverty and piracy, pain beyond belief. How many times did I throw myself from Dagger's bed, clutching my head and recalling the reason why I was afraid to sleep? And how many times did I question which agonising reality was true?  
  
* * * * *  
  
Keep guessing....  
  
Coronis 


	4. Chapter IV

Howdy y'all, been busy (have I fuck), but here's chapter four, as you can plainly see. I must have swallowed the Cheshire Cat. Meow. A Yuri/Halley is brewing in my tiny mind, problem is I've forgotten most of the plot of Shadow Hearts so I've had to play it all again. Yeah, like that's a chore.......  
  
Chapter IV  
  
It is endless. At sunrise we are born, we take up arms and laugh as blades pierce our smiles and our hearts; we fall, almost through the earth itself - Gaia, epiphyte whore. By the light of the virgin moon we are revived and once more we battle and burn, spawned twice by a solvent fireball deity and its devitrified concubine. I have been shown things, this night. Brothers, each long starved by his chosen path, one the saviour of an empire, the other a shadow drowned in a chorion of dreams and desperate for fear of himself. Laguna. Vincent. Two dead men, one taken long ago into the hub of some crisis from a radioactive sky, the other aging in the mellifluous arms of my trappistine goddess. Myself, and Zidane. Past devastations ache still, gilt-spun hair and caesious eyes, now a kind of sculpted uniform poured about his adolescent shoulders. Desire always is the trigger-finger of pain, heaven's molested snipers buried in a hail of their own bullets.  
  
Searing agony. Brilliant radiance. My hands fly to my temples and clutch nothing of the pain tearing through my skull, slamming against my eyes with infinite images I recognised. A sword, clasped in my arms like a steel-lined lover and then alive in my left hand, biting back with all my caustic fury, a rage that would destroy me and all the world unless I acheived extinction, channeling it down the bolted metal shaft and through an endless chain of lifeless gods, men and monsters. Then beside me, even as I slept beneath the stars with a heartbreakingly beautiful blonde man, silenced only in sleep. I had to make him scream, because........I had already made him kill. At that time no gods could threaten us, their power just hollow decrees from an impotent string of reluctant dictators. They could try, but my lover need only say the word and he would have their heads. And any part of me.  
  
My filthy back room in the forgotten wastelands of Treno's slum district weighs heavily on the soul of such a romantic, but for now it is adequate. We couldn't risk letting the king see me having one of my nightmares in his bed, now could we?  
  
"Kuja? Are you here?", that unmistakable swan-song of the brunette seraphim called me closer to the door, partly for fear that she should see my dwelling in its ghastly entirety. "I must speak with you. I apologise for my reticence but you must understand that - "  
  
"Understand what?", as if I didn't know that. She loves Zidane and Zidane loves her. Why must she explain this to me, suck out my aching heart with those cherry-blossom lips and throw it to her lover like a burning blood-soaked apple. She steps inside uninvited but not unwelcome, callously casting off her enceinte cloak and arranging her obsidian hair in perfect symmetry.  
  
"That I am restricted in everything now........even those I may love", her long lashes dropped, contrite and submissive, and for all I tried to reach out to her, I seemed further away each second.  
  
"Dagger, if there was anything.......you see, I.......", the words had made sense before I'd tried to articulate them, but upon leaving me they tripped and fell through gaps in a sectarian spiderweb, the oblique gossamer strands ignited by aslant sunrays from which they cower.  
  
"Kuja, are you drunk?"  
  
"Sober as a judge", I couldn't even shake my head.  
  
"So you are drunk!", the Queen scolded me, albeit a little too loudly. And with that she was gone, possibly because of frustration, and possibly because of the Alexandrian guard who'd materialized on the opposite balcony. I don't know why I killed that nameless soldier, or how I instinctively knew how to use her own special-issue machete so well that my magic was but pleonastic adornment.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Serpent, Dragon; death and darkness, who sealed my eyes with spiteful stitches and watch me slip away. I can feel something warm, a chasm drawn in daylight's air and perpetuated by his hand. He is reaching for me, as I knew it would be. A gift, my love? I thank you. You will be rewarded, when I assume my rightful place upon the throne of this vagrant world, and it won't be long now. From our own arms we will carve the blades of justice, the sun as a sword and the moon as a through thrusting fire, now so far under my control I barely notice their existence.  
  
Not long now........  
* * * * *  
  
"I don't think that because you haven't heard from me for a while that I went to sleep. No, rather I am still here. Like a spirit. Thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest; anxious to please Sam......Now the void has been filled...... In their blood and from the gutter, Sam's creation." -- David Berkowitz (Son of Sam)  
  
Coronis @-}--- 


	5. Chapter V

For Hazel Chapter V  
  
Secrets bleed and time is circular, coiling around itself in defence from the cold, its forked tongue impaling young love's radiance. A kingdom squandered and revenge so close, Serpent and Dragon tread the stage, girandoles fly and my Baptism grows near. I am gliding through that crawlspace between slumber and lucidity, calling back all those parts of myself torn loose by a procurator who now commands my torturers from behind some faint star-screen where the sun never shines.  
  
A great deal has changed since Zidane became Regent, the nineteenth pawn in a shivering dynasty, although some things never will. No matter how hard he tries.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Garnet.........  
  
Exhaustion gnaws at the pathetic shreds I call sanity, each fragrant, convulsive orgasm seeping beyond my soul and returning to haunt my life. I fear so often that I commune with a higher force when I enter this alternate realm, this coalescing reality that one day I will not be permitted to leave. Pray tell thine student, how should I pay adequate homage to this midnight scented metamorphosis with mere words? Would not the original vision, in all its coquettish glory, be stripped and fragmented before being absorbed into the mind of another, beaten and squandered so that none will know the truth. And if this fraternal force misunderstands my wishes then that proves my point exactly. Feed it words to keep it caught, let this uncommonly beautiful zeitgeist tear your heart out if it means maintaining your possession of that moment, that laugh, that self-confident swagger. After I am spent, a discarded addict on the floor of his Memoria, all that remains will be a bleached skeleton, smiling secure in the knowledge that his efforts were not worth the sacrifice. That's all I am, bare bones for all to behold. Then Serpent and Dragon rebuild me.  
  
I am weak again, Kuja once more, not the effeminate masochist who lives day by day in dormant suspense with a six-foot sword. Through the haze of smoke, stale air and the stench of rats and alcohol I reach for the shuffling mass of darkness, groaning in confused agony as perception fades into the insignificant moonlight. That thing.....now another, dark and formless, searching, hunting. Shrouded, crouching, Squall and Seifer on a dawn-lit beach. None of this is real....please.....let me go......  
  
* * * * *  
  
Serpent's hair falls into his cyan eyes, he cries a tempest of flaming tears and crawls on his knees before my temple, my canyon, stabwound in the Planet herself. My child, arise, lead my campaign as only you know how. Convince your superiors, you know I'm the only way. I feel your breath between my lips, Kuja, you know I am you, you know you need me. I do so delight in my own calefacient capsule universe, how I love my world. And when war comes, we will create another.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Some say that there is no diference among the barbarians, that they are all the same offal-eating abominations. This is false. The Portuguese will trade guns for women. The Dutch demand gold. The English want treaties. From this, you should know that the Portuguese and the Dutch are easily understood, and the English are the most dangerous. Therefore, study the English carefully and ignore the others". -- Suzume no Komo (1641)  
  
Coronis 


	6. Chapter VI

Chapter VI  
  
If they ever realise who I was, what I have done for them, to them, time will not grant them repentance. It may seem so distant, so plastic and sickeningly cheap, and yet still it holds the majesty to make me choke back the taste of something so sweetly toxic, an effete sting behind my eyes fashioned from their virginity to purloin their life's light one last time. I can't forget either first time, that hallowed eve when someone is truly yours, and will be for the eternity contained within that one surise and sunset. Then, of course, it ends.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Of water, wings and wind, of scarred angels burned alive by love's passionate heresy I believe I may lie here until the day I die. Mother......My hands no longer shake, Serpent and Dragon threw themselves at my perron as they once did for you, their names crumbling in the ashen remains of everything they served their short lives to attain. They think they are in love, you know. Just like Kuja. Poor, confused abomination, failed son, clone and puppet of a power so much higher only we can comprehend. He knows that we are one, that his life has been a lie and that he prolongs the untruth voluntarily, because he is afraid. Mother......what fate shall befall him, this waxen silver stain upon the ragged wolf's moon tonight? The answer is clear.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Those dark Manichees spiralling ever downward their own ovate malefiscence, voids unto themselves with nothing to offer but my soul to my other self. I saw him...it....me....they called it a general, a hero, a priest of his own bastard faith. Zidane, you offered yourself to me then also, as did Garnet, and again was she at your side, praying for me to spare you and surrender you to her ice-branded arms, to a care so sternly wrought by a pitiful, restrained lifetime of viciously enforced rules that she cannot love him as fully as I. The air tonight a milky violent, to inhale is to obey. To see all these figures transcend themselves, manes of glory, righteousness and sexually transmitted sin. Mother.......Jenova......  
  
* * * * *  
  
Coronis  
  
Is it wrong to believe in fanfics?  
  
"The moon is not mistaken when it rises, nor the stars when they fall....Like the dream of a wise man, born in the morning and gone by noon, neither fantasy nor substance"  
  
--Mareg, Grandia II 


	7. Chapter VII

It's still going, sorry. I should probably not leave months between each update, but, hell, I can't think of a feasible excuse just yet.  
  
Chapter VII  
  
An educt's wedding at death's right hand, pierced by a lance of light. People are graceful ghosts, skipping through the annals of time until they find a more desirable era. All of us breathe in different times and yet are the same. My, no, Garnet's king, stalks the halls of his demented basilica, his feet alight with suspicious flame, for his is a strangely pleasant torture, forbidden to witness the advent of a new and innocent deity. She is mine, Zidane, as much as you are. Burning for all the things I never did, I reached out to him, inviting him to witness the absolute idolatry truth would instill in both of us. I saw it all and closed my eyes, never to be opened again. New eyes grew, torn into my heart by my mother's cries of anguish.  
  
I can't tell who I am any more, I love those I have loved since I came to Alexandria, and yet that name sounds unfamiliar, its enceinte edifices not suited to their title. I will call it Midgar, as I feel I always have. Above the city gates a plaque proclaims the notion, "I am the reincarnation and the life". I will kill their God, for It is the bringer of death, the only reason for reincarnation. Peddle your shameless philosophies to one who will die some distant day, not my dear royal court and I.  
  
* * * * *  
  
It hurt, like she knew it would. It smelled of chlorine and ammonia, it looked like a Cloudless sky at six a.m, and it hurt like hell. It's the time for pain, and it's accepted before it comes and yet it will gnaw with every ounce of its bedraggled might all the same. Don't die, Garnet. Don't kill my baby.  
  
The child's name, a neophyte ball of energy and curiously violent love. Kuja. My name. Sephiroth.'s alias; sandalwood and stolen zephyr, safe in another's arms. Another Garnet. With longer hair and fists of hot sinewed steel.. A beautiful guerilla, pretender to the throne of her dead mother, her and all our bastard children. She did not push our daughter into this arrogant reflection of a discordant world, more the future forced herself past her mother. She's the queen now, Tifa.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Fantasy is blind men's utopia, this I know, the place where adrenaline flows as wine and magic soars with the rising wind. And maybe the fantasy we create ourselves is the only real magic left.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Coronis  
  
"What's coming through is a lie  
  
What's holding up is a mirror  
  
And what's singing songs is a snake  
  
Looking to turn my piss to wine  
  
They're both totally void of hate  
  
Killing me just the same  
  
The snake behind me hisses  
  
What my damage could have been  
  
My blood before me begs me  
  
Open up my heart again"  
  
Tool, "H". 


End file.
